Raindrop juggling act has its rewards.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

POSTCARD FROM LOOKOUT POINT DAM - From a small room dwarfed by a 276-foot Army Corps of Engineers dam, I imagine that the Willamette Valley is one giant airport.

Only what's landing and taking off aren't planes, but zillions of drops of precipitation that fall between Cottage Grove and Portland, east of the Coast Range crest and west of the Cascade Range crest.

And here I am, 15 miles southeast of Eugene, in the air traffic control tower Wednesday night. At the height of flood season.

It's here, in a powerhouse that's part industrial heft (think coffee-can-sized socket wrenches) and part Starship Enterprise (think 20-inch computer screens and gauges galore), where Lee Trope decides who lands and who takes off.

He and the others in the corps are the quiet Masters of a Very Soggy Universe.

"My job," the 59-year-old Springfield man says, "is to keep the water in the river and out of people's yards."

Sounds simple enough.

And as he computer-clicks to widen a gate at Blue River Dam, 65 miles away, by two inches, you're tempted to think it is. But the corps' Willamette Flood Control Center, you soon realize, is more complicated than a Schedule C.

A schematic visual of the Willamette Valley's dam and river system looks like some sort of nuclear reactor blueprint.

Meanwhile, the room is wall-to-wall in computers. Dials. Charts. Switches. Maps. Graphs. Phones. Faxes. Closed-circuit TVs. Buzzes. Beeps. Flashing lights.

And a mass of data. (Want to know how long, under normal conditions, a drop of water takes to get from the Middle Fork of the Willamette River at Lookout Point to the confluence of the Willamette River and the North Santiam River near Salem? About 42 hours.)

Trope's 5:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. shift involves nine of the system's 13 dams, dozens of rivers, scores of gauging stations, hourly hold-or-release instructions from the Reservoir Control Center in Portland and, above all, weather, which always bats last in this seasonal game.

"Raining out there again," a janitor says above the soft din of a couple of turbines that are producing enough electrical juice beneath us to light Springfield and Eugene for an evening.

With rainstorms unloading with the consistency of the PDX-to-SeaTac shuttle, the valley drainage basin is now O'Hare International during a Christmas snowstorm.

The challenge during flood season is letting out enough water from the reservoirs to free up ample storage space should a major storm hit - without flooding out downstream residents in the meantime.

"It's a giant juggling act," Trope says.

And it gets scarier as reservoirs start reaching their capacities during the storms; on this night, for example, Fern Ridge is 85 percent full and rising.

What if the dams exceed their capacities?

"That's the fear," he says, "and it's very real. We're still trying to get rid of last week's water, and more is coming in."

Immersed in this high-tech operation, it's tempting to forget that what this is really about is finding a compromise between people and nature.

That although a computer-sent signal across a phone line can trigger the closing of a multi-ton dam gate, a tree limb can also jam that gate.

That though technology rarely fails, once, when power went out at Hills Creek Dam on the Willamette's Middle Fork, Trope had to descend a powerhouse ladder in pitch black to open a gauge by hand.

That for all the one-touch computer control Trope has, there are times when his best data comes from some riverside resident whose back lawn is getting eaten away.

"Nights like tonight are challenging but rewarding," he says. "You get to see the results of what you do. You slow the outflow of a dam and an hour later you see the difference in the water levels in the river below that dam."

And what a difference it all makes. The valley flooding we experience now is small-time compared with the days before the corps began building flood-control dams in 1948.

Some of us, for example, still remember going from Corvallis to Albany during the Christmas Flood of '64 - via Salem.

The corps estimates that over the decades, the dams have prevented more than $35 billion in flood damages.

For now, Trope makes phone calls to Portland, answers calls from residents, charts data, adjusts flows, watches monitors and then fields a question from a columnist who can't wait any longer.

"Can I let out some water?" I say.

And I'm not talking about going to the bathroom.

The Fern Ridge Dam needs a slight alteration; its four gates are currently opened 1.88 feet; they need to get to 1.90. Trope gives me the thumbs-up.

Like a co-pilot taking instructions from ground control, I listen as he talks me "home." I carefully point my mouse's cursor at the "Raise" button of Fern Ridge's Gate 1. Click. Then quickly to "Stop."

An impulse surges across a phone line and clicks a sensor on the Fern Ridge Dam, forcing oil into a hydraulic disk and opening the gate.

The computer bar graph goes to 1.92. Too much. I click "Lower." 1.90. Bingo!

I precede to open each of the four gates three-eights of an inch, which increases the flow into the Long Tom River from 2,490 cubic feet per second to 2,565.

In only one hour, my simple adjustments will have sent 2,019,6000 more gallons into the Long Tom.

Which is why I'm more than a little concerned when overhearing the phone call to Trope shortly thereafter.

"Yeah, it's not good to hear a river when you're not supposed to hear one," he says to the caller.

It is a woman who lives near the Long Tom, below Fern Ridge. Uh-oh.

But her worry was about the river rising the previous night; the waters have receded tonight.

"Still, she's just concerned," Trope says.

When the rivers rise, we all are. After watching the operation at Lookout Point, I found myself less so; even if Trope will, for the next eight hours, be the lone person on the "tower," a few hours here makes you rest a little easier.

Though we should never forget: The corps may control the runways, but not the skies.

And they aren't always friendly.

Bob Welch can be reached at 338-2354 or at [e-mail].